MegunoLink Pro: serial data visualization and control

MegunoLink Pro is a Windows application for receiving and sending serial data. Any devices that use serial streams over USB, RS-232 or UDP are supported including the Arduino, PIC, mbed, Beagle, and Basic Stamp micro-controllers.

MegunoLink Pro provides a selection of visualizers which interpret serial messages to help you quickly present information from your embedded controller in helpful and interesting ways. You can also send commands to control your device with buttons that generate messages or by typing into a monitor window.

Visualizer windows can be docked, stacked and rearranged within the application window so you can customize the interface for your project.

A reporting tool saves a snapshot of selected results to a file — either periodically, or at the press of a key. And a connection manager lets you receive data from multiple devices simultaneously & particularly helpful in wireless projects to monitor the behavior of many sending and receiving nodes.

I just love it! I have tried dozens of other options and it took me like a year to get to MegunoLink. There are a lot of people looking for exactly something like this and they do crazy things to get a plot from Arduino. I have no idea why they do not use MegunoLink.

—Krzysztof W.

Thanks! I no longer need to install hardware switches, it's so easy to just use the interface panel.

—Vesku

MegunoLink is a very useful product to rapidly create interactive interfaces when your application needs to display data and simple controls.

—Luca – Lucadentella.it

Megunolink has proven to be a useful piece of software. It gives you a friendly and powerful connection to all the data from your microcontroller, and also a simple GUI for control via serial.

—John Boxall – Tronixstuff.com

Interface Panel

With the Interface Panel Visualizer, you can create a user interface to send serial commands to your micro-controller program.

MegunoLink Pro includes a designer where you can layout a form by dragging and dropping controls such as:

images,

buttons,

sliders,

number and

text boxes

These controls can all be combined to quickly build a custom user interface for your project.

MegunoLink Pro works with your current communications protocol because you control the format of the messages sent when buttons are clicked or control values changed.

Communication is two-way. Using a message processor, your micro-controller can update the user interface as its state changes by sending simple serial commands.

Plotting

The time-plot (shown here) and xy plot visualizers plot serial data so you can quickly see how measurements made by your embedded program are changing.

MegunoLink Pro will plot data sent from your micro-controller in real-time so you can see measurement changes as they happen. Pairs of x, y values can be graphed on a scatter plot, or simply plot data against time for a strip-chart like display that quickly shows what’s going on with your sensors.

Data for the plot is taken from serial messages like: {TIMEPLOT|DATA|Temperature|T|18.4}.
These messages can be easily created using our Arduino Library plot functions.

As well as custom titles, a range of colors and marker styles are supported so many series — one for each sensor — can be easily shown on a single graph.

Or, if your micro is sending several different types of data — perhaps voltage and temperature — you can have multiple plots in a single project. Each plot shows a single channel; each channel can contain many different series.

The plots will even scroll automatically to show just the latest data, while preserving the history for later scrutiny.

Included with MegunoLink Pro…

MegunoLink Pro has many ways of presenting your data and working with your hardware. All of these are included:

MegunoLink Pro can talk to many micros at once. The serial connection manager lets you assign names to ports, configure baud rates, handshaking and reset most Arduino micro-controllers. It will create USB serial, RS-232 and UDP (over Ethernet) connections. It can also use a file as a serial source: useful for replaying log-files.

Serial data can be stored in a file as it is received for later review using the log visualizer. Each line can be (optionally) time stamped. The log file is flushed to disk every time you switch away from MegunoLink Pro so that you can see the latest version of the log in your text-editor.

Using maps fetched from the open MapQuest API, the mapping visualizer lets you mark locations on street maps. You can mark more than 20 different locations, which are identified with a table, by simply sending the label and location from a GPS receiver to the mapping visualizer.

The programming visualizer uses AVRDude, the same tool used by the Arduino IDE, to upload programs to Atmel micro-controllers. A perfect companion to our Visual Studio Arduino Build tool, the visualizer will detect new builds and automatically upload using the AVR ISP MkII, AVR Dragon or the Arduino serial bootloader.

We’ve released a set of LGPL Libraries for the Arduino platform. The library includes tools for handling serial commands, saving data to EEPROM, filtering, buffering along with classes for sending data to plots, tables, and message channels in the format the MegunoLink Pro recognizes. The library is freely available from GitHub, and packaged with MegunoLink Pro.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any problems or questions and, if you decide MegunoLink Pro is not right for your application, you can use our uninstaller to remove it from your system.

I just love it! I have tried dozens of other options and it took me like a year to get to MegunoLink. There are a lot of people looking for exactly something like this and they do crazy things to get a plot from Arduino. I have no idea why they do not use MegunoLink.

—Krzysztof W.

Thanks! I no longer need to install hardware switches, it's so easy to just use the interface panel.

—Vesku

MegunoLink is a very useful product to rapidly create interactive interfaces when your application needs to display data and simple controls.

—Luca – Lucadentella.it

Megunolink has proven to be a useful piece of software. It gives you a friendly and powerful connection to all the data from your microcontroller, and also a simple GUI for control via serial.